Introduction
Software modernization can help your business significantly reduce costs and improve performance by updating or entirely replacing outdated systems with modern technologies, architectures, or practices.
Maintaining legacy systems can be a huge financial burden. Modernization can directly impact the high financial burden associated with maintaining legacy systems, which can lead to substantial long-term savings. With software modernization, you can achieve reduced maintenance costs, lower infrastructure expenses, enhance security and compliance, etc.
With software modernization, you can also attain speed and reliability. In this blog, we’ll take a deeper dive into what exactly software modernization is and how it can reduce costs and improve performance for your business.
What Is Software Modernization?
Software modernization is the process of updating legacy applications or existing software and their infrastructure to leverage modern technologies, architecture, and development practices.
At any point in time, your software can become obsolete and irrelevant to your business. When you fail to leverage modernization, your software’s maintenance costs can increase. Not only that, but it can also have a direct impact on your customers’ satisfaction and can bring down your competitive advantage.
The primary goal of legacy software modernization is not just updating the code, but it also increases your business value by making its software scalable, reliable, secure, and more efficient.
There are several common modernization approaches you could come across, depending on the cost and the complexity when modernizing an application. These approaches include re-hosting, re-platforming, and re-architecting, and are sometimes referred to as the 3 Rs. So, what exactly do these three approaches mean?
Re-hosting
If you are looking for a fast and the least complex modernization approach, re-hosting is your answer.
Re-hosting is also called lift and shift. True to its name, this approach involves moving an application and its data from its current hosting environment to a new infrastructure without having to make significant changes to the code, architecture, or features. Some of the benefits of re-hosting are quick migration, less development effort, and lower risk.
However, this approach doesn’t fully leverage cloud-native features and does not address technical debt or performance issues in the legacy code. Therefore, the re-hosting approach is deemed fit for applications with low need for immediate modernization.
Re-platforming
Re-platforming is otherwise called the lift, tinker, and shift approach. This involves moving the application to the cloud and making minor changes to optimize it for the new platform without having to change the core application code.
Re-platforming is essentially migrating to the cloud and making essential changes to the platform components to gain cloud benefits.
This approach strikes the perfect balance between speed and optimization. Since it uses Platform as a Service (PaaS), it can also reduce operational burden. This approach is best for applications that need better performance and scalability.
Re-architecting
The most comprehensive and intensive modernization strategy out there! That’s re-architecting for you. This approach is also called refactoring, and it significantly modifies the application’s code and architecture to adopt a cloud-native model. This approach involves breaking a large monolithic application into independent microservers and adopting modern practices like continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) and containers.
This approach offers you high scalability and reduced operational costs in the longer run. That said, this requires a lot of investment, time, and specialized skills. This also involves a higher risk of bugs and deployment issues. Re-architecting can be ideal for applications that require maximum scalability and agility.
Why Legacy Systems Hold Businesses Back
When it comes to software for your business, you need to keep updating it to stay relevant. Legacy systems can cause several setbacks to your business, including security vulnerabilities. Technology debt is a real thing and can cause your business a major setback in multiple ways.
Hidden costs: Outdated systems can be inefficient and slow, and can cost your business time and money. The hidden costs of outdated systems go beyond just the operational costs. Many companies spend around 60% of their IT budget just to maintain their legacy systems. This can significantly limit your organization’s ability to compete. With legacy systems, your employees will also be forced to rely on manual workarounds, which can also lengthen your processes.
Security vulnerabilities: Legacy systems can easily fall victim to cybercriminals. The lack of up-to-date security patches can leave your business exposed to known exploits. This can lead to a major data breach exposing your customer details and corporate information. Legacy systems lack the necessary audit trails, encryption, and data governance, putting the company at risk.
Lack of scalability: Legacy software will act as a wall against modern capabilities. Monolithic architecture cannot be scaled up on demand. With legacy systems, you can also come across data silos, as these applications cannot communicate easily with each other or with new cloud-based tools. This can cause critical information to be trapped in separate systems, preventing a unified view of your business.
Cost Benefits of Software Modernization
Software modernization can help you reduce costs in the long run. Modern systems are easier to update, patch, and manage. This reduces the need for specialized IT staff. Modernization can also automate routine tasks and free up your IT team’s time for more relevant tasks.
Moreover, the high cost of supporting unreliable, old applications can also be minimized, leading to improved reliability and reduced revenue loss from outages.
The other core benefit comes from the cloud’s cost-efficiency or a pay-as-you-go model. When you move your modernized application to the cloud, you go from making huge, one-time purchases for servers (capital expenses). Instead, your cost becomes a flexible operational payment.
Performance Benefits of Modernization
Modernization of software can improve performance across 3 key areas.
Systems built on modern frameworks are undeniably faster and efficient. They are designed to process transactions, load data, and run reports in seconds. This can significantly bring down the time your employees are spending on each task and boost productivity.
Moving to a cloud-native architecture can allow your system to scale horizontally. Modern software can automatically add more resources to handle sudden spikes, unlike legacy applications that crash under load.
Modernization can also offer your employees reduced manual workaround and offer your customers fast, reliable, and easy-to-use applications that provide them a better overall brand experience.
Real-World Examples of Cost Savings and
Efficiency Gains
Modernization can offer clear efficiency and financial gains across the board. Real-world examples show us that modernization can bring down hardware, software, and staffing expenses by up to 50%. For example, the Department of Homeland Security saved around $30 million annually by migrating to the cloud.
Modernization also improves efficiency as it automates 65% of repetitive tasks and can boost staff productivity by up to 40%. Not only that, you can also experience up to 80% reduction in system response time and a 74% drop in overall system maintenance demands. Businesses report up to a 14% increase in revenue post modernization.
How to Approach Software Modernization
Strategically
To successfully carry out the modernization of applications for your business, you need to assess your current system’s weaknesses and analyze your future needs. This can help you choose the right modernization path for your business. To navigate the complex choice between the lift-and-shift and rebuild method for your business, you need to partner with an experienced development team that can ensure that the path chosen aligns with your business goals.
Conclusion
Delaying modernization can impose a heavy financial burden on your business. This is because the benefits of modernization significantly outweigh the upfront costs. Modernization can have long-term benefits like cutting down on maintenance costs, enhancing performance, and scalability. It can also mitigate security risks.
The more you delay modernization, the more technical debt you will fall into. Legacy software modernization is a strategic investment that can help you survive the competition and grow your business sustainably.
Looking to modernize your legacy systems? Our experts can help reduce costs while boosting performance. Schedule a free consultation today.
FAQs:
Software modernization is the process of updating old, legacy systems to be current and efficient. This involves replacing outdated code, adopting modern architecture, and integrating new tools.
Modernization can help your business reduce high and unpredictable maintenance costs, fix security issues, and improve the speed and efficiency of your systems, reducing your costs in the long run.
You can potentially see initial results and cost-saving benefits within 6-12 months. However, the full ROI can be seen within 1-3 years.
Not updating your systems can push you into technical debt, as your business is vulnerable to security breaches. Your business will also be met with slow and inefficient systems that are incapable of responding to market changes and expectations.
ByClarityTech provides end-to-end modernization services from assessing your current systems to choosing the right path to modernize your systems and execute the migration with no disruption to your business.
